Can XML-RPC performance be improved?

[Paul McGuire]

"Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at nospam.web.de> wrote in message
news:48apnrFj7ambU1 at uni-berlin.de...
> Sion Arrowsmith wrote:
>
> > I've got an established client-server application here where there
> > is now a need to shovel huge amounts of data (structured as lists of
> > lists) between the two, and the performance bottleneck has become
> > the amount of time spent parsing XML (it's taking 100% CPU on one or
> > other end of the connection and accounting for well over 50% of the
> > total call time, to the extent that it's having a greater impact on
> > performance than user interaction). And this is using SGMLOP for
> > parsing -- I dread to think what it would be like with a slower
> > parser. Anyone (Fredrik?) got any good ideas for tackling this
> > problem?
>
> CORBA. Or TCP/IP directly.
<snip>

Beware, CORBA marshaling/unmarshaling can be similarly deadly, especially if
you are passing Any's and have to marshal complex type codes.  But if you
are just sending arrays of octets, or strings of chars, then CORBA
marshal/unmarshal will be quite fast.

Of course, something will have to convert that array to meaningful data
*somewhere*!  You can't really eliminate software complexity, you can only
move it around.  (not original, I'm quoting Chris Stone, founder of the OMG.
Also from Chris Stone - "I finally came up with a good definition for
middleware.  Middleware is the software nobody wants to pay for.")

-- Paul